Very slow extracting speed with 7zip

doodah · 3 Jun 2013 at 13:57

There was a spare new tower at work which I started using on Friday. Decent spec; i5-3570 & 8GB of RAM. However I tried extracting some rar files this morning and it beyond slow. Two files, one around 1.7GB and the other 1.3GB. It is about 80% of the way through with an elapsed time of 1 hour and 15 minutes @ ~500 KB/sec.

My old PC (4GB RAM/C2D) was nowhere near this slow. Any ideas?

Running Windows 7

turboturtle · 3 Jun 2013 at 14:39

I find extracting is much faster using 7zip

doodah · 3 Jun 2013 at 14:43

This is with 7zip. Something is up with this PC, just took almost a minute to save a small picture file. It seems to go through spurts of complete melt down and then normal activity.

Perhaps something to do with the HD or indexing. A 1.7GB file is taking an age to copy, almost 20 minutes, to my GS4's 64GB class 10 card.

Meekal · 3 Jun 2013 at 15:27

Could Run HDTune to try and find any bad sectors. Does seem an aweful long time for a file that size.

bledd · 3 Jun 2013 at 15:28

Check event viewer for hard drive errors..

Try another SATA cable.

doodah · 3 Jun 2013 at 15:45

HD Tune says its health is OK and the error scan came up with nothing. Not sure what I am doing in Event Viewer.

Kotu · 3 Jun 2013 at 16:19

Try using the resource monitor to see what the drive activity is while copying. It could be something like an anti virus program intercepting all the reads

darael · 3 Jun 2013 at 22:47

What are the CPU temperatures? Run something like SpeedFan in the background to monitor the CPU temperatur then run Prime95.

bledd · 4 Jun 2013 at 09:31

In event viewer, look under 'system' for any errors..

See here

About 2:20 in, he finds a bunch of hard drive errors.

doodah · 4 Jun 2013 at 12:27

This is very strange indeed, think I have found the problem.

Basically these new towers were having problems with their LAN connections in our offices - the network icon on the taskbar kept refreshing (acting as if it dropped then reconnected) causing a disruptive connection.

This seemed to happen when the LAN port was connecting at 100/1000Mbps so lowering the the Link Speed & Duplex to 10Mbps made it stop. Our tech guy came in yesterday and fiddled with the settings and it seemed to settle on 100 but this morning the same problem happened again. I have now switched it back to 10 but in this mode is what seems to be causing the computer to do everything slowly e.g. copying a 400MB file from my USB 3 stick (in USB2 mode) said it would take 10 minutes. Basically anything that requires reading or writing to the hard drive.*

So it's either have slow(er) internet, massively slower hard drive functionality but no network drop outs OR have full speed internet and hard drive functionality but intermittent network connection. Most of our work/folders is stored on shared/network drives. How annoying.

*Edit - just realised if I copy to the local C drive - speeds are fine.

darael · 4 Jun 2013 at 14:54

Does it happen in just Windows? I'm wondering about drivers. Have they been updated? Use something like DriverGenius to check the drivers and download as necessary.